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Category: Universities

Uniquely Universal

Universities are astonishing, unbelievably resilient entities. Clark Kerr once noted that of the 75 Western institutions founded before 1520 (and which have survived intact to the present day), sixty of them are universities. But universities aren’t merely unique in their reach across time – they are also unique in their reach across space. Few if any institutions are as truly global as a university. The basics of a campus are instantly recognizable whether you are in Nairobi, Tianjin or Regina.

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June 18, 2012 2 Comments

Bibliometrics: Measuring Zero-Impact

Bibliometrics aren’t just useful for analyzing who’s being cited; they are also pretty good at telling you who’s not being cited, too. Today, we’ll look at professors whose H-index (see here for a reminder of how it is calculated) is zero – that is, professors who have either never been published or (more likely) never been cited. There are three reasons why a scholar might have an H-index of zero. The first is age; younger scholars are less likely to

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June 14, 2012 1 Comment

Bibliometrics: Who’s the Best?

Today, we released the full version of our bibliometric paper, showing H-index averages on a discipline-by-discipline basis. You can find it here. (Keep in mind while reading it that the H-index isn’t a wholly straightforward statistic to interpret. If one discipline has an H-index of 10 and another has an H-index of five, you can’t simply say that professors in one discipline publish twice as much as the other. An H-index is just the largest number of publications for which

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June 13, 2012 1 Comment

Architecture and the Role of the University

Robert Hutchins, a former president of the University of Chicago, once described the university as “a collection of departments tied together by a common steam plant.” There’s some truth to this. Most academics will profess more loyalty to a discipline than an institution. Disciplines fight amongst each other for resources and the departmental structure they occupy has enormous possibilities for empire building. The only thing that really unites them is the heating plant (and perhaps the Finance and HR people

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May 31, 2012 1 Comment

Universities and Employment: Whose Job is it, Anyway?

Not surprisingly, a few of our readers have been pushing back on the series this week. Mainly, they’re skeptical that universities, in fact, have any responsibility where is employment is concerned. One line of argument is that students, themselves, are not in fact that concerned with employment. Exhibit #1 for this view is usually the well-known factoid that although 80% of students say they are at university to improve their employment prospects, a similar percentage say they are there because

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May 29, 2012 2 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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